Online Shopping Boom

ComScore has just announced that US shoppers have broken the record for online shopping. The Monday after the US Thanksgiving holiday has come to be known as “Cyber Monday”, as online shoppers cash in on holiday specials. This year UK shoppers spent over $733 million in 24 hours.

ComScore’s appropriately named report, “Holiday Season e-Commerce” has announced that since the 1st of November, 2007, over 10.7 billion dollars have been spent online.

The day was named “Cyber Monday” as it previously been recorded as the day when most US residents start doing their Christmas shopping. With the benefits of buying online, citizens have turned to the Internet to order their gifts online rather than going to the mall. ComScore, an online tracker company, estimates that the shopping craze will continue for the next few weeks, up until Christmas. There are expectations that expenditure will reach 800 million dollars on some days.

Cyber Monday’s online spending went up by 21% this year, beating last year’s record. The day is the most significant spike in all holiday spending. The number of online buyers grew by a total of 38% from the previous record. However the average amount a person spent online dropped by 12%.

It has been reported that the decrease in spending could be attributed to companies offering discounts and becoming more “internet savvy” with their advertisements and sales. A fair amount of the large companies in the US had Cyber Monday sales online for the new trend of online shopping.
The report showed that 6% of US internet users made online purchases on the Monday, with 60% of them coming from work computers. A few retail websites went down on the day, as the traffic surge caused technical problems with their sites. Error messages popped up on users' screens instead of completed transaction notices. Yahoo reported that the traffic on their Yahoo! Merchant Solutions caused smaller retail companies’ websites to black out for several hours.

However, larger retail sites, such as Wal-Mart, Dell, Best Buy, Circuit City and Overstock.com jumped up their traffic scale by 100%. There was a 261% increase reported on the MSN Shopping site operated by Microsoft. However, it is not only websites that are finding the boom in traffic stressful; credit and house markets are also being buffeted by the extra strain.

The Friday after Thanks Giving is known as Black Friday. The National Retail Federation showed that, according to their survey, more than 147 million shoppers went online on Black Friday. This is up from last year, by 4.8%. Overall there’s been more than a 4% rise in holiday spending this year.

Black Friday was originally named due to the amount of high traffic on the day. Although it is not an official holiday, most UK citizens take the day off for a long weekend. Because it is also the start of Christmas shopping season, there is a large amount of traffic on the roads. As online shopping becomes popular, traffic on the roads is moving over to traffic on websites for the shopping.

With delivery times taken into consideration, online sales should relax and calm down as the festive season declines. However, sales at shops and malls should slowly pick up with Christmas now only a mere month away.

Celeste writes for Online Buying and Shopping News who specialize in shopping online.